Scribble Paintings

 I've been scribbling a lot lately, layering marks in various materials. You can see previous posts about this work here and here.  Like many techniques, scribbling is easy. Making an interesting image with it takes some effort, careful judgement, lots of micro-decisions, and practice. Her is a video showing one way that a particular scribble painting developed. Processes vary quite a lot between individual works, but there is some consistency among those that I do in one "sitting". A sitting doesn't mean all at once, start to finish, but that I work on the group continually until they are done. I don't leave them for weeks while I work on something else. So there is a continuity of thought process.

Here are some of the pieces in this series. They are all 11"x14" on Bristol.

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30-Minute Mark Making

30-Minute Mark-Making is an exercise I do when I'm not feeling particularly focused, or if I need a jumpstart in the studio. It's pretty simple, but not easy. Basically, you just paint/collage/draw for thirty minutes, in a continuous manner.

1. Choose your format, i.e. size and material of substrate. In the videos I am working on three 19"x24" sheets of Bristol, which are pinned to the wall.
2. Get out your materials. I'm using a paint, a bit of collage (and matte medium for adhesive), graphite, and Caran d'Ache NeoColor II crayons.
3. Start the timer and get to work. Stop (optional) when the thirty minutes are up.

The point is to practice NOT hesitating, judging, trying to plan the next steps. So as soon as you DO hesitate (which is inevitable), catch yourself and make a mark. You'll see this in the second video, I do hesitate and then notice that and keep going.

The first video is the first round of the 30-minute exercise in time-lapse. The second video shows actual time and I chat a bit about what's going on in my head.

This is where the first 30-minutes ended up.

This is where the second video ends up. These are all still works in progress, but they are looser and more surprising, or at least different, than if I had not imposed the 30-Minute rule.

The hardest thing about this exercise is to remember that CONTINUOUS work for 30-minutes is the ONLY rule. You don't have to cover the page or the multiple substrates, you certainly don't have to finish anything; you don't have to make anything you like; you don't have to work fast.

I would love to hear of your experience if you try this. You can change the time frame if you like - twenty minutes, or an hour, or five minutes - as long as you stick to the continuous rule. Let me know how it goes!

Making Marks

I usually need a break after my busy teaching season, which ended this year with a workshop in Pensacola, FL the first week of November. Then there is Thanksgiving, for which I take time out to see family and cook.  Getting back into the studio for any kind of regular painting practice always takes some time and effort. It's a shift from teaching-traveling mode to more inward-looking, solitary, exploratory mode. The key is to align my expectations with the reality that this is a transition. As enthusiastic as I am to get into my studio after a long season of teaching, it's never easy.

I've been laying pretty low this week with a bad cold, and just poking my head into the studio to push paint around for an hour or two each day.  Works In Progress are great for this: I can just do one or two things to a few pieces with no pressure to finish them, but just to move them along somewhere.

Yesterday I did a little Mark-Making exercise: on a stack of cut-offs from my paper cutter, which are all about 5"x8", I used limited tools to make lines and patterns, paying attention to creating variety and leaving some breathing room.  Here are some of the results:

You can see from these that there is some overlap in the kinds of marks I made. For example the arch or half-circle shape appears in four of them, with variations in a couple of the others. The awkward scribble makes an appearance in a few of them. There is a pattern of irregular dots and dashes in some of them... And yet each one is unique. Each one has something - a color or a mark - that it does not share with others.

I think this kind of working-in-a-group, WITHOUT trying to make anything specific, often reveals some of our default marks, suggests new combinations, and generally greases the wheels for visual exploration. To me it is important that these "studies" have no pressure on them to BE anything other than the result of a process. If they went directly into the wood stove now, it would be fine; their purpose has been served. I've made them, and I've looked at them.

Crayons, Again

So I'm still on this crayon kick, and wanted to try various crayons on a pastel ground.  Pastel Ground is a product that Golden makes, which transforms your paper into a toothy pastel paper.

This was my "beginner's luck" piece.  10"x10" on gessoed paper

This is the piece I did in the demo.  I used the materials mentioned in the video, plus various brands of oil pastel.

In this one I'm trying to copy the first piece, at top.

Here is a link to the Cretacolor Monolith pencils.  I think everything else is in my previous post.